room for them now,"
said Tobie's owner,
Jean Frogner. "So I taught Tobie to pull. It's
all just an excuse to get outdoors."
Yards away from the pull was the finish line
of the Grand Portage Chippewa John Bear
grease Sled Dog Marathon, a 500-mile race
commemorating a late 19th-century Ojibwa
mail carrier. Both the pull and the race were
part of Duluth's four-week Winter Sports Fes
tival. Every community seems to have one.
At Houghton, Michigan, home of Michigan
Technological University, students race on
snowshoes and speed skates and in homemade
dogsleds, with students as dogs. I'd never
before seen volleyball played with mittens on
snow-covered courts. (No spiking allowed
the cold-hardened ball can deliver a knockout
blow.) I walked across campus with Heidi
Meyers as students put last-minute touches on
house-size snow sculptures.
"I was set to go to school in Florida," said
Heidi, a sophomore from Maryland majoring
in chemical engineering. "But I came up here
to help my older brother move in, and I was
impressed with the friendliness and the sense
of personal safety in the community."
At the Bon Soo Winter Carnival at Sault
(pronounced Soo) Ste. Marie, Ontario, I
watched participants in the Polar Bear Swim
cook in a mass sauna, then run 50 yards to dive
into a hole in the ice of the St. Marys River. A
submerged steel cage protected them from
being swept under the ice by the current.
Cocky grins lit their faces on the way in; des
peration marked their scramble out.
RELISHING THE COLD seems almost a
religion. I got into my car at Bon Soo
to coax the blood back into my fingers just
as Gerald Desmoulin and his two young
daughters headed cross-country on skis.
"We're only going three miles," he explained.
"It will warm us up. If you let weather stop
you up here, you'll spend more than half your
life indoors."
Skiing may have come to North America via
Lake Superior. "We can't prove it," said Ray
Leverton, curator of the National Ski Hall of
Fame at Ishpeming, Michigan. "But so many
Scandinavians came here to fish and work in
the mines, it's as good a candidate as any."
The bread-loaf mountains around the lake
aren't as high as the Rockies or Sierra, but nei
ther are the prices for skiing them. Inadequate
snow is seldom a problem. Fifteen inches fell
the day I skied one of the dozens of resorts
around the lake. I found control difficult on
slope angles hidden by the whiteout of falling
flakes. Then I met Dick Nooe of Neenah, Wis
consin, who wears a banner that reads, front
and back, "blind skier."
"I like figuring out the fall line of the slope
by the way it feels," said Nooe, who lost his
sight in Korean War combat. To steer him
away from trees and other obstacles, family
members follow, shouting "left," or "right
sharp" when necessary.
"I accidentally directed him into a pile of
National Geographic, December 1993